It's such a shame Adobe acts like this; they used to be a reputable technology leader. These days most of their products seem like scammy upsells.
Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract
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Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract
#22How do these contracts hold up to charge backs through the credit card company?
Also, consumer protection laws. I smell a pile of fines and lawsuits in their immediate future.
As I understand the charge back process, vendors are generally assumed guilty until proven innocent, and it's not going to be worth Adobe's time to fight these. On the other hand, it costs credit card companies a boat load of money to acquire customers, and failing to issue legitimate chargebacks is a great way to lose customer. On top of that, the bank makes more money from a chargeback than a legitimate charge.
I've successfully issued charge backs against Experian, for example. You can't get much more in bed with the credit industry than they are. (Though the operator at the credit card company did say that Experian was responsible for about 50% of their caseload that year...)
Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract
#23I cancelled an adobe subscription years ago. I still get constant emails about renewing. I hate subscriptions so much. The only one we have right now is Disney+ for the kids.
Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract
#24OT rant: > Ooh, I can scroll. That was not obvious at all. It is if you use a proper browser+OS combo. Why some designers thought it was a good idea to hide the scroll bar in their OS (which some browsers adopt to) is beyond me. It's also an annoyance as a user with a browser that display scrollbars. The amount of random scrollbars appearing because the devs never tested anything but Mac+Chrome is staggering.
> the devs never tested anything but Mac+Chrome Which Android browsers show scrollbars?
Firefox does, briefly when you load a scrollable page. And then shows it again while scrolling, naturally.
Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract
#25The billing page does say "annual plan, paid monthly" but it is a bit non obvious at first glance. Oddly this seems to be only in the UK version, the US version has a much clearer pricing layout.
> But what does "Annual plan, paid monthly" actually mean? Let's fill in our email address and press continue. Maybe that's explained on the next page.
This Twitter thread appears to be a person who indeed noticed that and had to delve into the fine print to figure out what it actually implies for the contract.
Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract
#26This isn't a solution and doesn't excuse Adobe's shitty behavior, but I use privacy.com which gives you single-purpose cards. That way, I can just pause the card and subsequent charges will fail. Then let them try to get their money. Pull-based payments are such a bad idea, implemented even worse. Privacy.com at least gives you per-merchant controls and limits, even though this really should have been a Visa default.
You're right here, they won't be able to charge you automatically via the credit card, but you're still legally obligated to pay for the subscription since you have agreed to the terms of service during sign up. Depending on the action that they would take, you could easily end up paying a higher amount than the original subscription price if they put additional charges on you...
Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract
#27They got me with this a year ago, and I can't wait to cancel my subscription at the end of this month and hopefully never have to be a customer again :)
Can't people contact their credit card provider to inform it as fraudulent charge?
They'll point you to the T+Cs which is something my bank did recently. Even though the company had changed identity to avoid their customers, the bank still went to the new web site for the new company and pasted the T+Cs from there.
Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract
#28Apropos of nothing, GIMP is pretty darn good, no charge, no subscription. Ditto Darktable, Inkscape et. al.
> GIMP is pretty darn good
GIMP could be pretty darn good if they gave 20 UX designers another 10 years to redo their entire UX. As is, it's a usability nightmare. Whenever I'm forced to use it, it feels like I spend 70% of my time fighting with the horrible UI, 25% of the time Googling how to do trivial things because it's very much not obvious, and 5% doing what I actually want.
Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract
#29I fell for this. When I called adobe to complain the service rep said, in a manner not much polite than this, that "I don't believe you that you didn't know you were signing up for a year". Looking back, I now see where I agreed, but the manner in which they attempt to deceive you is criminal.
Fucking scumbags.
Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract
#30Speaking of dark patterns, has anyone noticed the DoorDash app sets the tip for you automatically and places the “place order” button above the tip form, which you must scroll to to make visible? there is no way to adjust a tip without calling customer support. This is such an obviously blatant deception. Off screen form fields _below_ a submit button? It’s insulting. I’m surprised I haven’t heard more complaining ab…
And the tips are their way of being able to limit the pay of their employees by offsetting their wages onto the end user.